As to your "can someone work me through the calculation" question, the Form 6251 is the place to look for that.
Very simply stated, a whole bunch of your itemized deductions are reversed, that "spread" between what you paid for the stock and its worth gets added, there's a subtraction for an "exemption" amount and then the AMT tax rate gets applied to the resulting taxable income for AMT purposes. If the tax calculated this way is higher than the tax calculated the regular way, you pay AMT.
Tom Young
